The problem I see with banning expertise feats is that there are some new feats that you'll want to take anyway, like spear expertise, which gives you a +1 to hit and an extra +1 to hit and +1 to damage when charging. Both set of bonuses scale on paragon & epic levels.

I was always in favor of turning our untyped bonus into a feat bonus rather than replacing it with a bonus feat. I think I'm even more in favor of it now that expertise feats have gotten so much more powerful. There's stuff in Essentials (Staff Expertise, I'm looking at you!) that would be well worth taking even without the scaling hit bonus, and the house rule is supposed to patch the math, not necessarily to give everyone a bonus feat.

The improvement is that it helps with other attacks. The new expertise feats, while nice, only work on one weapon, which means you're back to needing 2 or more expertise feats to get your needed +1 to attack.

So, if you have a weapon attack, an implement one and a racial attack the way things are now you'll be missing the free bonus.

The way I see it, if you get it as a feat bonus on all attacks, the inherent math problem is fixed and no damage is done.

This is not about "forced" feats, after all, obligatory feats will always exist, battleminds will always take melee training, chargers will now always take spear expertise, avengers will always take power of skill or MT, wizards will most likely all take the new staff expertise and so on. What this seeks is to fix the +1 to hit that 'secondary' attacks are not getting.

The improvement is that it helps with other attacks. The new expertise feats, while nice, only work on one weapon, which means you're back to needing 2 or more expertise feats to get your needed +1 to attack.

So, if you have a weapon attack, an implement one and a racial attack the way things are now you'll be missing the free bonus.

The way I see it, if you get it as a feat bonus on all attacks, the inherent math problem is fixed and no damage is done.

...

But it seems to me that the secondary attacks were designed to not work with them on purpose. There are feats to help that (like the one that allows Dragonbreath to count as an arcane power and benefit from implements). This is part of the reason their accuracy increases over the tiers.

For weapon and implement users, there is still versatile expertise, so they can choose between a bonus to both of them or to one with an extra benefit (similar to Great Fortitude and Paragon Defense). This also looks to me like intentional design and not a flaw.

This is not about "forced" feats, after all, obligatory feats will always exist, battleminds will always take melee training, chargers will now always take spear expertise, avengers will always take power of skill or MT, wizards will most likely all take the new staff expertise and so on. What this seeks is to fix the +1 to hit that 'secondary' attacks are not getting.

The proposed system favors characters with weapon and implement powers and races who get a racial attack. They get the equivalent of Versatile Expertise plus an otherwise hard to get bonus to their racial power.

Others, who use one weapon or implement type will want their expertise feat anyway ('forcing them to take it'), having to pay the full 'feat tax' for a smaller benefit and have no benefit from the proposed change.

I think the 'One-bonus-expertise feat' rule is the fairer one, giving a small benefit to characters dedicated to one weapon or implement type and still give weapon and implement users still the choice of the Versatile Expertise feat.

BTW, adding a bonus feat is much easier in the character builder than adding a level dependent feat bonus on 'to hit'.

Regarding the CB I always add as many bonus feats are needed to get the +1 to all attacks. My point is actually that, you may need more than 1 feat to get the +1 for all your attacks.

At least that's the way I see it. I avoid multiple attack sources characters like the plague, mostly because not every game has a +1 house rule, not to mention that getting a weapon and implement of the appropriate level is quite expensive for most characters. (ie: most of my avengers just use any divine symbol I came by to use their ranged at will power. My paladins usually don't use implement powers and so on.)